1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments herein relate to a transponder unit, a transponder unit control apparatus, a transponder unit control method and a recording medium recording a transponder unit control program.
2. Description of the Related Art
WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) is used commonly in the optical communication network field to increase the transmission capability of an optical fiber line. A WDM system applies the characteristic that optical signals with different wavelengths do not interfere with each other. A WDM system transmits multiple optical signals with different wavelengths through a number of transponder units equal to the number of wavelengths to be multiplexed.
A wide variety of client data protocols has appeared in recent years for use in optical communication in the WDM system. The client data protocols mainly use transponders applicable to various data protocol rather than a transponder only applicable to a specific data protocol. For example, SONET/SDH was predominate in existing systems while transponders which are compliant with data-related data protocols such as Giga Bit Ethernet (registered trademark) (GbE) or video-related data protocols such as DV6000 have become predominate.
Here, in a conventional WDM system, all transponders (such as a transponder unit A, a transponder unit B and a transponder unit C in FIG. 11) must define data protocols to be supported (or used). The definition is mainly performed manually (refer to (1) and (2) in FIG. 11).
JP-A-2004-64585, for example, discloses a technology including, in SDH line terminal equipment, identifying a line type of a received frame and processing the received frame by using setting data corresponding to the identified line type. More specifically, the SDH line terminal equipment stores setting data corresponding to the line type of the SDH line. Then, upon reception of a frame, the format of the received frame is identified, and the line type is thus identified. Then, the received frame is processed based on the setting data corresponding to the identified line type.